Mea Culpa: Mister the Lord as he then was not

Questions of language and style in last week’s Independent, reviewed by John Rentoul

We got into a bit of a mess with thens and nows discussing Neil/Mr/Lord Kinnock (PA)

We referred to Neil Kinnock, the former leader of the Labour Party, in Thursday’s editorial about Sir Keir Starmer’s pitch to the voters. On the second occasion, we said: “The then Mr Kinnock was a genuine man of the left who found himself, mostly for electoral purposes, shedding principles and crabbing towards the right.” We called him “the then Mr Kinnock” because our usual style for a second mention would be “Lord Kinnock”, except that he wasn’t a lord when he was Labour leader.

I think in this situation we should just call him “Mr Kinnock” because that is what he was at the time. That he is now a lord was irrelevant to the argument in the editorial – indeed, we didn’t refer to his peerage at all, except by implication in that awkward “the then Mr” formulation.

We also got our tense wrong in saying that he “was a genuine man of the left”, which made it sound as if he is dead. He is very much alive and offering a voluble and entertaining commentary on politics. We could have said he “had been” a genuine man of the left.